My Mom Wants to Dress Like Holly Hunter on HBO’s Here and Now

My mother has been watching Here and Now, the new HBO show about a multi-ethnic Portland family starring Holly Hunter and Tim Robbins. She is (her words) “not impressed” by the show, but also seems (my words) to really, really love it. Over the recent holidays, I found her watching it in bed, utterly rapt.

Further proof that my mother is at least a little impressed with the show came in the form of a phone call this week. She wanted to know if there is a website that tracks outfits worn on TV. More specifically, she was hoping to find out where to purchase a shirt Hunter wore in the fifth episode of what I then realized might be her favorite-ever television show.

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Since I work for such a site (it’s this one, the Strategist dot com), I set out to find Holly Hunter’s blouse for my mother. I screengrabbed it, looked up the costume designer, wrote her an email, got distracted, and promptly forgot about the entire thing.

Until a few days later, when I saw the following tweet from The New Yorker’s (Pulitzer Prize–winning) television critic Emily Nussbaum: “Here and Now is a terrible show,” she wrote. “But I would dig a Pinterest board of Holly Hunter’s clothes.” The tweet was liked 45 times! I felt a renewed surge of energy to help two women I love: my mother and Emily Nussbaum.

The show’s costume designer, Chrisi Karvonides, filled me in on working with Holly Hunter. Karvonides called the experience “amazing,” because Hunter devoted at least five hours per episode to figuring out her costumes, and “difficult,” because Hunter is a size double zero, which, poor Holly, meant everything needed to be significantly altered.

In the earlier episodes, Karvonides told me, she dressed Hunter’s character, named Audrey, as a “professional, but still slightly artistic, working mother of four.” But later, when Audrey loses her job and meets an attractive divorced man named Steven, she transitions into “soft and feminine with higher shoes,” Karvonides says. The result is a mix of both realistic and aspirational pieces that I was delighted to gain access to: Karvonides told me where to find the shirt my mother wanted from the fifth episode, plus a few of the character’s other best looks from the show, which I am pleased to share with you, my mother, and, also you, Emily Nussbaum.

Also from Joie (and, confusingly, also called Devitri — Joie appears to have a whole floral collection by that name), this shirt is a similar and cheaper version of the one that launched this investigation.